Persistent is now showcasing this product to states, as well as working on search capabilities in other Indian languages.Priyanka Sangani | ET Bureau | Updated: September 12, 2016, 09:20 IST

A few weeks ago, the Uttar Pradesh Vidhan Sabha unveiled a new multilingual intelligent search facility for all legislature proceedings for the last 30 years.

The documents -and some videos -have been scanned and automated and stored in a digital vault and can be accessed through any device. What's unique is that you can search for them in English or Hindi.

UP is the first Vidhan Sabha to digitise legislature proceedings at this scale, using a solution provided by Pune-based Persistent Systems and Hyderabad's SemanticBits.

"Search in Indian languages is a big problem. The potential that search, if done right, presents has been clearly demonstrated by Google," said Anand Deshpande, CEO, Persistent Systems.

Deshpande wants to bring the same kind of accuracy and prowess to Indian language search, particularly in the government space.

"In India, we are nascent in our organisation and collection of data. There's been a rapid change in the data available and if bring in some level of standardisation of data access and open APIs then the data can be valuable," he said.

Persistent is now showcasing this product to states, as well as working on search capabilities in other Indian languages.

"There is a tremendous amount of data in the judiciary and other government bodies down to the taluka level which could be easily accessed in minutes once it's digitised and searchable," said Sameer Dixit, practice head analytics, who is closely involved with the project.

At present, accessing most government data is a lengthy process, most times requiring a manual search.

While this would help make government proceedings easily accessible, it would also help government researchers access data more quickly and speed up proceedings.

Making this data searchable is a time intensive process as most of the digitisation work has to be done manually.

While the algorithms may be in place, making it sensitive to the Indian context and doing sentiment analysis is equally important. Persistent is eyeing a bigger play in different aspects of Digital India beyond just multi-lingual search.

"We are focusing on data integration -it will form a big part of what we are trying to do. We believe that the next generation of things will happen by integrating data across multiple sources and are investing in finding solutions that are relevant locally," said Deshpande.